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A team of scientists led by U of C grad Casey Hubert has detected high numbers of heat loving, or thermophilic, bacteria in subzero sediments in the Arctic Ocean off the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen. The bacterial spores might provide a unique opportunity to trace seepages of fluids from hot ...
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The investigative work of a group of public health graduate students who work for the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) has helped find the sources of the country's two most recent major salmonella outbreaks, in peanuts earlier this year and in jalapeño peppers (previously blamed on tomatoes)...
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Researchers from the European Institute of Oncology in Milan, Italy, analyzed three strains of the common probiotic Lactobacillus for their immunological properties and efficacy to treat or prevent inflammatory bowel disease in mice. The results suggests that each probiotic strain should be char...
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A recent paper published in PLoS suggests that the warming of the Mediterranean Sea's surface water is turning "marine snow," mostly organic detritus falling from the upper layers of the water column, into marine mucilage, a gelatinous evolving stage of marine snow, which can reach huge dimensio...
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PLoS One has published an interesting paper that considers using smart phones for scientific field data collection and suggests mobile apps could also be beneficial for recruiting ‘citizen scientists’ to contribute data easily to central databases through their mobile phone.

A wireless, credit-card-sized sensor that can detect whether health care workers have properly washed their hands upon entering a patient's room is being studied at the Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center. The device could greatly reduce the number of hospital acquired infections nat...
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In a decade-long initiative to protect millions of families from malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, a U.S. government-funded project helped sell 50 million bed nets in seven countries, crafted a voucher system to allow the poor to receive them for free or partial cost, and created enough incentives ...
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Small businesses play a key role in protecting employees’ health and safety as well as limiting the impact to the economy and society during an influenza pandemic. Advance planning for pandemic influenza, a novel infectious disease that could occur in varying levels of severity, is critical. Com...
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Scientists in Pennsylvania report that boosting production of crops used to make biofuels could make a difficult task to shrink a vast, oxygen-depleted "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico more difficult. The zone, which reached the size of Massachusetts in 2008, forms in summer and threatens marin...
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Bean plants' natural defences against bacterial infections could be unwittingly driving the evolution of more highly pathogenic bacteria, according to new research published September 10 in Current Biology.

The study sheds new light on how bacterial pathogens evolve and adapt to stresses from...
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Researchers have found a pair of compounds that kill dormant tuberculosis bacteria in monkey and lab-grown human cells, according to a study to be published on Thursday. The discovery could lead to new drugs that disable the microbe, which lies inactive in approximately two-thirds of the world's...
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This New York Times article examines the shortage of funding for biotechnology and life sciences companies as traditional major investors pull back. Even as the industry experiences a surge in new funding this quarter, overall investment remains at mid-1990's levels. The state of the industry, h...
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In order to be able to ward off disease pathogens, immune cells must be mobile and be able to establish contact with each other. The working group around Professor Dr. Oliver Fackler in the Virology Department of the Hygiene Institute of the Heidelberg University Hospital has discovered a mechan...
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"Think you need antibiotics to fight that cough or cold? Numerous Web sites are willing to sell them to you without a doctor's prescription — a loophole, researchers say, that could undermine efforts to curb the problem of bacteria that shrug off powerful antibiotics.

UPI reports that researchers from the University of California-Davis and Georgetown University Medical Center studied bacterial DNA in patients with an ileostomy -- an opening into their small bowel -- and patients with closed ileostomies.

The swell of enthusiasm for analyzing microbial genomes continues, with keen interest in doing more and more genomes in smaller analytic formats at lower costs. Even while greater numbers of microbiologists jump into this fray, some continue to fret over what to make of these expanding findings,...
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